Phoenix once again decks the halls with wows of folly

Fond memories of the "old" Phoenix seasonal show give a buzz like rum in the holiday entertainment egg nog. That treat has been newly spiked by Ben Asaykwee and Claire Wilcher in "A Very Phoenix Xmas Returns."

Unlike the much-missed founder Bryan Fonseca's annually curated anthology of sketches by a variety of

The cast in full cry for the season's joys and otherwise

writers, the new show relies on the creative fecundity of the two collaborators and their zest for performing, with the cast filled out by Carlos Medina Maldonado and Shawnte P. Gaston. 

As seen in the second performance Sunday afternoon on the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Center's Basile stage, the show refracts Hoosier holiday phenomena through a satirical prism. The humor is broad and goofy, with a large admixture of trenchant wit. The show is not without heart, however, chiefly in the implied advice to take what remains significant to you in how Christmas is celebrated and tolerate the rest.

The religious import is oblique, chiefly through an imitation of a living Nativity scene, during which the four tableau participants break character and complain in between "freezing" under the gaze of visitors. There are no nods to Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, because the focus is the largely secular variety of attractions, customs, and scenes thrust upon our metropolis. The spiritual resonance will lie somewhere in the minds of the beholders, many of whom will welcome relief from the season's attendant stress. 

The show provides such relief in abundance. The original opening song, "Might As Well Celebrate Christmas," uses that mood as a refrain distributed among the cast. The scene is the lighting of the Monument "tree" on the Circle, represented in Zac Hunter's set design and resourcefully used and reused in the show with a door in its base. As the action begins, it's warm enough (what a fantasy!) to eat lunch outdoors, and Wilcher is predictably hilarious simply in peeling the shell off the hard-boiled egg she has taken out of her paper bag. The show is going to be lots of fun, you know immediately.

The cast gets a chance to rest briefly and change costumes with a projected parade of past and present Hoosier notables on twin screens, animated and voiced to extend greetings, sometimes jaundiced and barbed. They include the likes of Mike Pence, Jim "Garfield" Davis, Madame C.J. Walker, Axl Rose, Orville Redenbacher, and Eli Lilly.

Generational and cultural shifts drive some of the sketches. Asaykwee plays a Fashion Mall Santa in training, hired to replace Maldonado, who's a retro Kris Kringle being given the heave-ho-ho-ho. He has no recourse — there ain't no sanity clause, as Chico Marx once said. The old Santa is required by his boss (Gaston) to train his replacement, a situation that has become sadly customary across the corporate world. Asaykwee's character is loaded with post-millennial attitude and cryptic slang: Ho-ho-ho has turned into meh-meh-meh. It's one of "Xmas Returns" brightest bits. 

The show has peppy touches of choreography to go with the singing (to prerecorded accompaniment). The "Sad Zoom Trio" is a nice send-up of how so many remote meetings have been conducted since the pandemic and the fantastic release experienced when everyone gets to hit "Leave Meeting." The three roll around on office chairs, casters presumably well-maintained for the run of the show. 

A couple of festive office-party bars roll out, one in each act. Audience participation succeeded on Sunday, and Wilcher and Maldonado got to exercise their improv knowhow as they served drinks for a few minutes. 

Three scenes have the Indiana Repertory Theatre's perennial "Christmas Carol" production as a focus, with handfuls of flung "snow" helping to set the scene and some of Dickens' most lurid writing in the original story getting mocked. It couldn't happen to a nicer icon. 

Gustav is just a welcoming Christkindlmarkt guide, but he has own needs too. 

You might expect any Circle City fun poked at Carmel to be the roundabout kind, but "Carmel Christkindlmarkt" is direct and a mite disturbing. Presenting himself as an eager-to-please guide, a masochistic stage-German youth stalks a lesbian couple from somewhere else, probably south of 96th Street. This is as far-out as the satire gets, and it couldn't happen to a more pretentious suburb. 

Running a close second in this sort of thing is the seasonal workplace mayhem placed at the Amazon Warehouse in Greenwood. Sweatshop conditions are raised to the nth degree, especially because uber boss Jeff Bezos (Gaston) has dropped in to deliver a scripted pep talk. Asaykwee plays a supervisor as hard-nosed as Dickens' Mr. Bounderby. The audience is thus invited to nurse severely mixed feelings about the expected abundance under the Christmas tree, and that recurrent ambivalence is celebrated with a hint of exhaustion in the show's finale. If "Xmas Returns" audiences through Dec. 23 are exhausted as well, it will be from laughter.

[Photos: Indy Ghost Light]